Free Plugin to turn any Track into a Bus

The original thread here was a bit vague on what the purpose of the actual plugin was, so I thought a thread with a more specific title might be helpful for people that could use a bus inside the track view. If nothing else, it might just make it visually more convenient to have tracks and their related busses all in the same track folder.
 
The idea is very simple. All the plugin does is present a "sidechain" input to Sonar. This makes the input available to any track or bus's output, or any track or bus's sends. The plugin then mixes this sidechain input with the main signal going through the plugin. The end result is that you can:

• Send the output or send(s) of one or more tracks into another track. The destination track(s) then becomes a "track bus".
• Send the output or send(s) of a "track bus" into yet another track. So you can create a complex chain for a signal where it can go through as many "track busses" as you want. I tested this by having many cascading "track busses" and it all works.
• One can also put an FX bin with a Sidechain Mixer into the PC (move the FX bin to the top), and use that "track bus" to do PC processing with.
• Insert multiple FX bins along various points along the PC so that you can insert signals from different tracks at different points. Not sure if it can be useful, but it works. You can also add multiple Sidechain Mixer plugins into the FX bin of a track or bus as a way to insert different signals at different points along the FX chain (once again, useful?).
• Feed the output of an actual bus back into any other track.

 
As an example, I have a "Vocals" track folder containing a track called "Clean Vocals". This track then has multiple sends that each go into the sidechain input of all other "track buses" in the same track folder. The outputs of all those "track busses" then go into a final "track bus" that serves as the main bus for the track folder. Now you can do all of your parallel processing right in the same track folder without needing to do it in a real bus. For instance one of the track buses is a "sizzle bus", based on Craig's tip #50.
 
All of the Craig Anderton tips involving a bus can be done inside a track folder without using an actual bus. For example:

• Week 2: The Biggest, Baddest Drum Reverb Sound Ever. One can now skip the required bounce step here. I used the CW Pitch Shifter on the two reverb-only track busses, not sure if there is a better option here.
• Week 50: The “Sizzle” Bus. I created the sizzle bus as just part of another parallel processing track bus.

 
You can find the plugin here. To use: 

• Unzip the files.
• Copy the 32-bit and/or 64-bit files somewhere into your VST3 folders.
• Let Sonar do a scan.
• The plugin shows up under Plugins > Audio FX > VST3 > Sidechain Mixer (or wherever you put it).
• Drag/drop the plugin into the FX bin of the track that you want to convert to a bus.
• Set the output of any other track to "Sidechain Mixer(Input 2)-[track bus name].
  
  

  Some points: 

• If you solo the track bus, Sonar will not solo the tracks feeding into the track bus. To get around this, solo the whole folder, or group the solo buttons together. Use Ctrl+Click to toggle individual buttons in a group. Note there is no need to group the mute buttons since they will work as expected.
• You need to set PC to Post-FX if you want the signal to go through PC.
• You only need one plugin per track bus. You can send the outputs and/or sends of as many tracks and/or busses to the same sidechain input as you want, and Sonar will mix them together before sending it into the plugin.
• If the 1st input into the plugin is mono, it will cause all other inputs to the same plugin to be mono as well. To work around this, make sure at least the 1st input is from a stereo source.
• I only tested the 64-bit version so let me know if the 32-bit version doesn't work.

 
SilkTone, thanks for this.
 
Is the link you provide in this thread to the same version of your plugin as in the original thread ?
 
Are you satisfied with it the way it is or do you foresee updating it at some point ?
 

Re the idea mentioned above... I played with 1 Stereo + 1 Mono sidechain input, but came to the conclusion that it doesn't make a difference. If your 1st input is mono, Sonar will still force all other inputs to mono, regardless of whether the 1st input is going into the dedicated "Mono" sidechain input.
 
It's not a big issue really, just make sure your first input isn't mono. So therefore the version linked to above is still the latest.

swamptooth
How about if you have one in a prochannel fx bin and another in a regular track fx bin?

That will work fine. It is only a problem when you mix mono and stereo inputs going into the same plugin. In fact, you could place two SideChain Mixer plugins back-to-back into the same FX bin and feed only mono inputs into the one, and only stereo inputs into the other.
 
I would think this is really a bug in Sonar. If any plugin has a stereo sidechain input, all other inputs would be forced to mono if the 1st one happens to be mono. Now probably there aren't many/any other plugins right now that care about whether the sidechain input is stereo or mono (other than Sidechain Mixer now), but there could be (I don't think the Sonitus plugins care). I imagine Sonar does this as a performance optimization (albeit minor), but ideally it should look at all inputs and if at least one is stereo (not just the 1st one), treat the input as stereo. After all, the plugin did present the sidechain input as stereo.

Now all we need is to be able to work out how to feed the signal into a tracks input rather than fx bin. I appreciate that it's probably not an easy thing to do???

Yeah, it would be a Cakewalk development or a virtual audio mixer like VoiceMeeter. I played around with this some time ago and it worked but was pretty finicky on my DAW. This is issue is similar to recording plug-ins live, which has been the subject of a few recent threads.

scook
What I would like to see in Sidechain Mixer is the VST3 header updated to put the plug-in in the Tools folder.

OK try the new one, version 1.1 (same link in 1st post). It should now show up in the Tools folder if you sort by category. You might need to do a rescan, not sure. I did one anyway.

Very cool little idea... Thanks Silktone. I'm not sure when I'll use this but it seems a handy tool to have "just in case"

I'll d/l it when I'm on my DAW...

In line with the people who would like to send signal to another track's input... What if a loopback could be somehow used to re-route signal? This way it would appear as a potential input to the front end of a track without Cakewalk needing to do anything?

...just a thought.

Keni

Keni & lfm...
 
From what I can tell, you cannot create an infinite loop since Sonar can detect this and prevent you from completing such a routing in the first place. See my comment in this post. This also implies that there should not be PDC issues since the signal path will never loop back on itself.
 
But this is just from my own observations. I don't really know how Sonar works internally but it seems that the correct checks and balances are already in place to prevent these kinds of issues.
 
If we are lucky, Noel might jump in and provide some details regarding Sonar's handling of this.

SilkTone
Keni & lfm...
 
From what I can tell, you cannot create an infinite loop since Sonar can detect this and prevent you from completing such a routing in the first place. See my comment in this post. This also implies that there should not be PDC issues since the signal path will never loop back on itself.
 
But this is just from my own observations. I don't really know how Sonar works internally but it seems that the correct checks and balances are already in place to prevent these kinds of issues.
 
If we are lucky, Noel might jump in and provide some details regarding Sonar's handling of this.

I'll check out the other thread too, thanks.
I know my brain loops at some point thinking over this - what you can do? 
 
Is anything violated when sidechain input does not just control something, but actually is fed through as audio and mixed?
 
If there is pdc not accounted for in this created chain?
If VST3 specs differentiate between input and sidechain in any way?
 
Easiest to put something rediculous like L3 with 3840 samples delay in there and see what happends. Anything going wrong will be heard I gather.
 
Would be neat if it works...

SilkTone
 
I believe someone did a PDC test in one of the initial threads and found it worked correctly. But you should do some testing yourself if you personally want to make sure you can trust it.

Thank you.
Don't get me wrong, I trust the plugin.
It's Sonar I might have doubts if such an implementation is expected or not.
 
I recently had some weird behavior in SA when I forgot to turn off direct signal i TrueVerb on a bus - so direct signal went two ways and created anomalies..

Keni,
 
In theory one can create plugins that send audio between themselves without explicitly connecting them together in Sonar. So one can have something similar to sidechain mixer that can be dropped into FX bins all over the project. Then you can have an overall master mixer (accessed as the GUI of one of the plugins), where you can route signals between all of those plugins together in whatever way you want. I won't be surprised if there isn't already something like that.
 
But that presents other challenges... Unless they are in the same signal path, Sonar will treat each individually, and you won't know in which order each one will be processing the same buffer in time. So maybe A must send to B, but B gets to process its buffer of data before A does, so you can't have a 0 delay plugin. You would need to report to the host that the plugin has at least 1 buffer worth of delay so that you can sync them up. Not ideal.
 
Also, with such an approach one can certainly create feedback loops since Sonar is unaware of and has no control of the signal flow.
 
Anyway, that is a much bigger project to tackle. For now we would need to stick with what extra routing options we can get out of sidechain mixer.

Thanks Silktone...

I think I follow your thinking...

Let's play with sidechain mixer a bit and see what thoughts and ideas cone up. Maybe that will uncover some new ideas...

Keni

Thanks again Silk Tone... this is rather neat. One thing that occurred to me is I saw this thread from my phone a few times and "assumed" it was a how-to with existing SONAR routings. Consider updating the thread title to "New VST - Turn any Track into a Bus" or some such. Very nicely done VST - simple, painless, effective... big win!